Death Comes to Cambers

by E. R. Punshon

  ‘Oh, you’ve made it your business, Mr. Dene,’ Bobby could not help answering, and Dene looked at him and said nothing; and soon Bowman came out from the trees into the comparatively open border round the rim of the little hollow.

  He was plainly nervous and excited, constantly stopping to look and listen, and vet too restless and uneasy to take note of what it was or the significance of what he saw and heard. For a little he stood or moved to and fro uneasily, and then he came to a standstill beneath an ancient elm. Into it he climbed, drawing himself up by an overhanging branch and when he let himself down again he was carrying a brown-paper parcel.

  This he opened, and showed, all piled together, a great heap of those glittering toys for which, from time immemorial, men and women have been so apt to barter their immortal souls, though dewdrops on a spider’s web

  in the dawn are lovelier by far, and their possession scarce less transitory.

  So there they lay, on their brown paper, on the green grass, while Bowman bowed himself above them in a kind of ecstasy; and in his excitement one of the watching constables moved, letting his helmet become visible. Bowman heard the movement, saw the helmet. With a loud cry, all the terror latent in him unloosed and rampant, he turned and ran, and, as it chanced, ran straight towards where Eddy Dene lay hid.

  Seeing him coming, Eddy sprang to his feet from the bracken that had kept him concealed.

  ‘Oh, no, you don’t,’ he called, mocking the fugitive. ‘No getting away this side, Bowman.’ And Bowman snatched a pistol out and fired.

  Eddy screamed, a shrill and dreadful scream, and his expression was that of a man who had received some gross and unexpected insult; nor was the arrogance in his dark eyes one whit diminished. Bowman was rushing on. They met, they grappled, they rolled together, over and over in the bracken that grew red where their writhing bodies passed, and three times more the pistol snarled. When the others came to separate them, Eddy had been shot three times – once in the chest, twice through the stomach – and Bowman had the tiny bullet of his own small automatic buried deep in his heart.

  CHAPTER 35

  CONCLUSION

  That Oscar Bowman was past all aid was plain, for as evident as strange is the difference between the body wherefrom the soul has fled and the body wherein the soul lingers still. But Eddy lived and was conscious, lifting himself on one hand and coughing a little, blood and froth gathering on his lips that he kept wiping with his other hand, the gesture with which he did so one of anger and impatience.

  Later on, a doctor who examined his body denied the possibility of this, and asserted that a man shot at point-blank range through the chest, the stomach, and the lungs could not possibly have had the strength to think or talk consecutively.

  But this doctor was a man of science, trained on scientific lines, and had no knowledge of the fierce, prideful will of Eddy Dene’s that could bend to itself most things, though not all. None the less, though his will was passionate still, and it was that alone held him, body controlled and mind clear, he well knew and well understood; and when Bobby came and knelt beside him, he said aloud: ‘Of all the luck, of all the crossway ends... there’s no one left to carry on my work.’

  ‘I wouldn’t talk,’ Bobby said to him. ‘They’ve sent for a doctor.’

  ‘You’ll never hang Bowman now,’ Eddy said; and Bobby answered sternly, for the words offended him: ‘We never should have. We knew the truth.’

  Eddy stared at him, and one could almost see his grasp upon his life slackening, as though that stern reply had loosened it.

  ‘What do you mean?... You knew?’ he asked; and then: ‘That chap at Hirlpool said something about mice... you knew about that?’

  Colonel Lawson came up in time to hear this, and it was he who answered.

  ‘We do,’ he said. ‘Also we have reason to believe that the fountain-pen you say you lost on Wednesday you filled with ink not available till the following Friday. I think you had better say nothing more at present, Dene. There are other questions you will have to answer.’

  ‘Not I – not one,’ Eddy answered, in a loud, unnatural voice; and, a little startled, the chief constable said to Bobby: ‘Is it serious? There’s not much bleeding.’

  ‘That’s why it’s more than serious, you fool,’ Eddy retorted, and, with that last characteristic word upon his lips, he sighed deeply, twice over, and was dead.

  Only a day later the adjourned inquest on Lady Cambers was to be held. So now two more were conducted at the same time and the whole story made clear.

  There could be no certain knowledge, since both concerned were dead, how Lady Cambers had been tempted out alone that tragic Sunday night, but there could be little reasonable doubt that Eddy Dene had played upon her fears of the consequences flowing from his pretended discovery of a fossil or fossils proving his contention. Almost certainly – as he had hinted to Amy he would do – he had added a suggestion that he might reinforce this supposed evidence by a little judicious faking; and Lady Cambers, simple-minded, direct, authoritative, had fallen headlong into the trap, and had determined to secure the fossils for herself.

  Dene had laid his plans carefully and well, and the complications he had so astutely introduced had done much to confuse and mislead the investigation, aided to an unexpected degree by the imaginative exercises of Mr. Samuel Jones.

  It was sufficiently plain, too, that Bowman, on discovering the body, had seen his opportunity to secure the keys of the safe in which the jewellery was kept. Nor had it been difficult, in the excitement and confusion of the morning, to slip unperceived into the house by the garden door – the key for that, too, was one of those he had obtained – rifle the safe, leave the keys in a convenient drawer, and slip off again, still unseen by any of the inmates of the house all gathered together in panic in the hall.

  From the first, Dene, alone in his knowledge that since he himself had not touched the keys they must have been taken by who first found the body, must have been certain Bowman had the jewellery. That meant Bowman was attempting to secure for himself the whole of the material gain from the crime, and Eddy was as determined to prevent that as he was to take his revenge upon the man thus crossing his careful plans.

  Unless Amy Emmers, as Mrs. Sterling, was put in a position to carry out her promise to continue to assist his work till there was completed his book he fondly dreamed was to bring him fame and fortune, all he had done was wasted, except, indeed, as removing one whom he had come to regard as intolerable meddler and tyrant.

  And with his private knowledge that it must be Bowman who had taken the keys, and therefore the missing jewellery, it was easy for him to see that a scapegoat lay ready to his hand, amiably offering himself.

  A careful, steady watch on Bowman’s movements would soon tell Eddy where the stolen jewellery was hidden, and it was quite reasonable to suppose that the possession of it would be taken as proof of guilt of the murder as well. Even if Bowman were acquitted, for lack of sufficient proof, of the charge of murder, no one would be likely to think that the real murderer was the clever disinterested tracker-down of the thief.

  In the end these calculations had proved vain, and, though it was plain Bowman had yielded to the sudden temptation to secure the jewellery, it was equally clear that Eddy was the murderer. The verdicts were given after but brief deliberation – in the case of Lady Cambers, ‘wilful murder’ against Eddy Dene; in the case of Dene himself, and of Bowman, ‘death by shooting’.

  Of the others who had played their part in these events there is little to be told. The Cambers estate had to be sold. The jewellery had to go, too. Mr. Tyler seized his opportunity, and Mrs. Tyler now proudly appears, with her ‘Cleopatra pearl ear-rings’, on the front page of nearly every issue of the Pictorial Babbler, so that she is almost as famous as the last divorced film-star. After all the liabilities resulting from Sir Albert Cambers’s violent assault upon the City had been cleared, there was no very large sum left. But on the four or five hund
red a year remaining, Sir Albert and the new Lady Cambers (née Bowman) live very happily and comfortably in a Cheltenham villa, golf by day and contract by night filling their simple, peaceful, yet colourful days, since at golf no hole, at contract no bidding, is ever the same.

  They have made many friends, too, for they are an amiable and reasonable couple, and quite content to leave the money Lady Cambers lent to her nephew as an investment in his wireless business, which is developing very satisfactorily. He has had several offers already from larger firms prepared, and even anxious, to take it over, but so far has preferred to remain independent, largely through the influence of his wife, for Amy is taking a very keen, efficient, and increasingly important share in the development of the commercial side of the business.

  By her advice, too, Mr. and Mrs. Dene sold their shop and retired to a small seaside bungalow. With their own small savings supplemented by the allowance she makes, they live their days as peaceful as their tragic memories permit – for in the end it was they who suffered most, and at nights they still whisper to each other of the strange misguided lad, talented, arrogant, and lost, whom it was their lot to have brought into the world. And, though there is not a word of it they can understand, they still read over, at times, pages of the disjointed, fragmentary manuscript notes, all that is left of the great book he planned.

  As for Sammy Jones, he, released with what he graphically described as a ‘flea in the ear’, and stern warnings about keeping his imaginative faculties in rein for the future, may be found any day working in a fairly good job he has obtained in a fairly good restaurant fairly near the West End of London. And Bobby, returning to duty, was told off at once to track down the headquarters of a band of miscreants reported to be endangering the morals of the country by carrying on raffles for boxes of chocolates at country fairs.

  About The Author

  E.R. Punshon was born in London in 1872.

  At the age of fourteen he started life in an office. His employers soon informed him that he would never make a really satisfactory clerk, and he, agreeing, spent the next few years wandering about Canada and the United States, endeavouring without great success to earn a living in any occupation that offered. Returning home by way of working a passage on a cattle boat, he began to write. He contributed to many magazines and periodicals, wrote plays, and published nearly fifty novels, among which his detective stories proved the most popular and enduring.

  He died in 1956.

  Also by E.R. Punshon

  Information Received

  Death Among The Sunbathers

  Crossword Mystery

  Mystery Villa

  Death of A Beauty Queen

  The Bath Mysteries

  Mystery of Mr Jessop

  The Dusky Hour

  Dictator’s Way

  The next title in the Bobby Owen Series

  E.R. PUNSHON

  The Bath Mysteries

  Bobby Owen is on a mission of unusual delicacy, finding himself conducting an investigation which involved his own titled but impecunious family. This time the cards were stacked against Bobby. He knew full well the cause of his cousin’s mysterious disappearance, but he could not understand the baffling circumstances surrounding Ronnie Owen’s death. Ronnie was a drunkard, but even a drunkard has sufficient presence of mind to refrain from remaining in a tub of boiling water for thirty-six hours!

  Was Ronnie’s death caused accidentally, or was it a deliberate case of murder? Moreover, why had Ronnie taken out a heavy insurance policy shortly before his death?

  The Bath Mysteries is the seventh of E.R. Punshon’s acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1935 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

  CHAPTER 1

  FAMILY CONFERENCE

  Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, leaving the Park, crossed Carlton Lane. Through the dark shadows cast by a cliff-like block of flats opposite he passed on, round the mews, into stately Carlton Square itself, where on the north side, No. 1, the ancestral home of his race, sprawled its interminable and depressing length.

  Bobby surveyed it with a sigh, thinking what a difference would be made in the family fortunes if only legal complication, jointures, mortgages, reversions, Lord knew what, permitted it to be pulled down, and a new block of spacious, super-luxury, one-room flats erected in its stead. But that could not be – at least, not without a special Act of Parliament whereof the expense would eat up all possible profit; and so Bobby sighed again, and then cast a glance of professional interest at the third window from the southeast corner on the top floor, that of the room where legend told that, a hundred and fifty years ago, a servant-maid had been murdered in mysterious circumstances never cleared up. Then, ascending the steps leading to the huge front doors, he knocked; and as from the very bowels of the earth a thin voice floated up to him.

  “Beg pardon, sir,” it said, "I can’t get them doors open; they haven’t been used so long they’ve stuck someway, or else it’s the lock. His lordship was proper vexed.”

  Descending to the street-level again, and peering over iron railings, Bobby saw, far below, the ancient retainer of the house whose services had been rewarded – or punished – by the job of caretaker of this mansion, which none of the Lords of Hirlpool had been able to afford to inhabit for three-quarters of a century past.

  “Do you mind coming this way, sir?” quavered again the voice from the depths. “His lordship had to, and proper vexed he was, too.”

  “Righto,” said Bobby, and accordingly descended the long flight of steps that led down to the area door, where the old caretaker waited. “Bit of a climb,” he commented; “if uncle had to, I can believe he didn’t like it. Do you have to climb those steps every time you want to go out?”

  “Oh, no, sir,” answered the caretaker, “there’s the back door, sir, opening on the mews, but it’s nearly ten minutes’ walk to get round there from here. This way, sir.”

  Bobby followed the old man through a series of grim, dark, chill, dust-strewn chambers, compared with which the vaults of the Spanish Inquisition would surely have seemed cheery, homely abiding places. They came to a spot whence steep and narrow stone steps led both up and down, though whether to a gloom more intense above or below was hard to say. But it seemed to prove that even beneath these depths there stretched depths lower still.

  “Good Lord,” Bobby said. “Are there cellars under these?”

  "These aren’t the cellars, sir,” answered the other rebukingly. “This is the basement floor. Over there’s what used to be the kitchen, and that’s the door of the old servants’ hall. Very spacious apartment, sir, and very different everything looked when there was a staff of twenty or more busy here.”

  “It’s a wonder they didn’t die of T.B. or rheumatism,” observed Bobby, peering into the dark cavern that once had been a kitchen. “Probably they did, though. What about the breakfast bacon? How long does it take to get from kitchen to dining-room?”

  The caretaker considered the point carefully.

  “I don’t think it would take more than ten minutes,” he decided; “not much more, anyhow. His lordship will be waiting, sir,” he added; “her ladyship, too.”

  “Oh, has granny got here already?” Bobby said. “All right, I’ll cut along. What about Mrs. Ronnie? Has she turned up?”

  “Yes, sir, she came the first. They’re all there except Mr. Chris. Mr. Norris came immediate after Mrs. Ronnie. It’s the small room to the right at the top of the big stair.”

  “Right, I’ll find my way; don’t you bother,” Bobby said, and began to ascend the steps leading to the upper regions of the house.

  As he went he wondered again what could be the meaning of this family conference to which his uncle, Lord Hirlpool, had summoned him; his grandmother, the dowager Lady Hirlpool; his cousin by marriage, Cora, who was Mrs. Ronald Owen; his other cousin, Chris Owen, the heir to the title and the family mortgages, debts, tithes, income-tax, and all the rest of the fina
ncial encumbrances that went with their old and historic name; and finally Dick Norris. He wondered, too, why Dick Norris had been included, since Norris was not one of the family, though he had been a very intimate friend of the vanished Ronnie Owen. It was a friendship that had been formed and consolidated on the links, for Norris was a famous amateur golfer, known to a wide circle through the articles he contributed to the golfing press under various pseudonyms, as “B. Unkert,”, “N.B. Luck,” and others, all in the breezy, healthy type of humour that made him so popular a writer.

  “Hope,” Bobby thought uneasily, as he groped his way up the dark, twisting steps, “Ronnie hasn’t been up to something they think I can hush up because I’m at the Yard.”

  But he did not think this very likely, as, though Ronnie had been wild and reckless enough, and had been badly involved in that disastrous and scandalous divorce case after which he had vanished from the ken of all his former friends and acquaintances, including his justly offended wife, he was not likely to have mixed himself up in anything of a criminal nature – at least, not unless he had been more badly drunk even than usual.

  “Must be something pretty serious, though,” Bobby told himself, as he emerged from the stairs and discovered he was by no means certain which was now the right direction to take.

  However, after one or two attempts that brought him back to his starting-place, he arrived at last in the huge sepulchral entrance-hall, a bare, desolate void ringed round by possibly the worst collection of statuary in the whole wide world.

  From the centre of this hall there rose the great double stair; so magnificent in marble and gilt, it would have done credit to almost any tea shop or cinema in the land. Indeed, one well-known provincial department store had recently made a tempting offer for it, though, unfortunately, trust deeds prevented its sale.